what's the point of java.nio?

[Adam Megacz <adam at megacz dot com>]

Er, I must be a dunce or something.  I've read through all the nio
introductions I can find, and I still can't figure out why Sun
introduced an entire package instead of two methods:

  static InputStream InputStream.select(InputStream[])
  static boolean Socket.nonBlockingConnect()

It looks like given these two functions I could implement all of
java.nio on top of java.io.  And the converse (io on nio) is certainly
true (libgcj does it).

So the only conclusion I'm left with is that it's somehow easier to
implement the native method support for nio more efficiently, but I
can't see how that is the case.

Can anybody clue me in?

  - a

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